Geek City: Plan Caching Internals

This Friday is the last of my summer seminars. On August 27, I am presenting on plan caching, plan reuse and recompile and plan cache metadata. This is one of my favorite topics to talk about, because a lot of the information is not very widely known, and you can have a tremendous performance impact by making sure when plans are reused when that is the best option and when a new plan is compiled when that is best choice. By examining the plan cache metadata, you can see exactly what plans are currently in cache and what those plans are doing, i.e. index seeks or scan? hash joins or loop joins? extra sorting? parallelization?